by Andrew Smith
Henry was always a mess—unshaven, with the feeblest scrub of facial hair dotting his jaw, a dingy white T-shirt twisted uncomfortably around his emaciated frame, spider arms, burgundy corduroy pants that hung in draping columns over his knees and leg bones. “I believe I’ve got some beer in the fridge. Want one?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”
Henry padded out the doorway. A light came on in the living room. I could hear him moving things, the clinking of glass, cupboard doors opening—all nauseating sounds that hovered like some avant-garde orchestral score above the flat, droning accompaniment of the aquarium. I picked up Ander’s jacket, knew by its weight that my phone had to be in a pocket somewhere.
Found it.
Henry came back, carrying two glasses. He pressed a light switch with an elbow.
I cupped my phone in my bandaged hand, took the beer in the other.
“What happened there?” Henry extended a finger from the side of his glass, pointed at the wrapping of tissue around my hand.
“Nothing,” I said. “I got cut.”
Henry’s brow pinched together, like he was thinking about something, remembering. Then he said, “Cheers,” and clinked his glass into mine.
I drank to the bottom of the glass without stopping. I don’t think I’d ever tasted anything as good in my life. Then I thought about what that meant. My life. What life? This life now? This life was only about five minutes old. The water in the fucking aquarium would have tasted just as good.
Henry drained his glass, too.
A couple newborns.
He said, “I’ll get more,” and took the glass from my hand.
It all looked the same. Henry’s apartment smelled the same. Sweat, cigarettes, and damp wool.
I followed Henry into the main room. I stood there in the doorway, watching him. I flipped open my phone.
Do you really want to do this, Jack?
This was Jack’s phone.
In the center of the universe that Jack built.
I checked the recent calls.
There were two calls to Nickie.
There were no calls between me and Henry.
But there was a call to Ander.
I never had Ander’s cell number.
I scrolled down and saw five calls in a row to Avery Scott.
The fucking cop.
And there were phone calls listed to the name Quinn Cahill.
No Conner.
No Ben or Griffin.
Another not-world.
Fuck you, Jack.
I had to sit down.
Drip.
I couldn’t stop the bleeding from my hand.
Henry poured beers, a fresh cigarette dangling like a white slash from his lips. I moved over and slid one of the wobbly wooden chairs out from his small kitchen table. I dropped my phone onto the floor.
Everything sounded so horribly noisy.
He put the beer down on the table and I stared at a spot on the floor between my feet.
Drip.
I didn’t bother picking up my cell phone.
Henry sat down, lifted his glass. “Cheers.”
I just looked at him while he drank. I don’t know why, but I wanted so bad to punch him at that moment. I was seething with anger and I needed to scream, to break something. Of course Henry could tell; how could he not notice something like that?
He took another long swallow. “Sorry about the place. Were you expecting something else? You’ve been here before, didn’t you say?”
I clenched my wounded hand into a fist. It stung.
I don’t know how I managed to sit there, to stop myself from leaping across the table and driving my fist into Henry’s face.
He laid on his soothing, condescending tone. “You should be happy. We’re finally home.”
I took a deep breath, filled up my lungs with the smell of Henry and his cigarette, the stale aquarium fog, his Chelsea flat.
“This isn’t the place. If it was the right place, you would know who I am.”
Henry didn’t react at all. I slapped the table. “Look at me! This is what I was wearing the last time I saw you! You don’t have a fucking clue who I am, do you?”
I sighed, looked down at my feet again. “We don’t belong here.”
I heard him take a long swallow. “I belong here.” Henry put down his glass and said, “What about you? Where do you belong, Jack?”
It was like he was telling me to get the fuck out of his house. He was done with me. I could leave.
I nodded. I drank the beer he’d poured for me. I stood.
I was horrendously drunk after two glasses of beer.
Stupid.
I almost felt like laughing.
“I’m going to get my shit and go,” I said.
My mouth felt numb. If he’d offered me another beer, I’d drink it, but then I’d want to fight for sure.
I kicked my cell phone toward the doorway, satisfied I’d made a goal into the bedroom with it.
I was drunk; and it was 5:44 in the morning.
As the sky grayed outside, the windows across the way didn’t appear so bright; the buildings paled to not-black.
Something was wrong.
“Where are you going to go?” Henry sat at the table in the kitchen.
I didn’t know where I was going.
“I have a hotel room.” I slurred the words. “Near Regent’s Park. Or my girlfriend’s house in Hampstead.”
I couldn’t know if any of that was true. I just said it.
I bent down, picked up the phone, and slid it into my back pocket. But when I tried scooping up Ander’s jacket, I lost my balance and ended up on all fours.
Jack is a fucked-up drunk.
Henry heard me, came in from the kitchen. The room was lighter now, all washed in gray, and I had my face pressed down into Ander’s jacket, trying to see if somehow it smelled like Nickie, like the house in Hampstead I remembered sleeping in.
There was a noise.
I knew it.
Roll.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I took a quick breath. Maybe I was just drunk.
I turned my face so I could look at Henry. He’d heard the sound, too, but I could tell he had no idea what it meant.
“Seth,” I whispered.
I pressed myself lower against the floor and peered beneath the bed.
I felt the vibrations of Henry’s steps as he got nearer to me. “What are you doing?”
It was totally dark under the bed, just black corpses of trash and cast-off clothing.
“Looking for something,” I said. “You’re going to know this isn’t it, Henry. You’ll find out. I don’t know how it’s going to hit you, but it will happen.”
Where are those fucking glasses?
I slid my hand under his bed, sweeping my fingers around through the debris, trying not to think about what I might be touching.
Then something tickled the hair in my armpit.
Whatever it was came out through my shirt and began crawling toward my hand.
I jerked my arm back from under the bed.
Stretching nearly the entire span from my elbow to wrist, a green-black harvester clung to my forearm, looking for the source of the blood it smelled, the cut on my hand.
Then the thing bit me, right over my middle knuckle, laying open a smiling, white-lipped gash in my skin. I was horrified and sick.
“Fuck!” I swatted my hand back at nothing, and the bug tumbled away, clicking its shell open and futilely buzzing the cellophane wings that could never support such weight. “It fucking bit me!”
Harvesters don’t eat living things.
The thing sailed past Henry and he moved aside nonchalantly, like he was stepping from the path of an errant tennis ball during a summer match in the park.
I sat up against the bed, squeezing my hand, watching the blood from the bite wound pool and run in a thick scarlet streak that dripped down onto Ander’s T-shirt and jeans, where it left button-sized
stains on my crotch.
Henry looked amused, his cigarette dangling loosely. Barefoot, he stepped on the thing. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell by how Henry’s stomps encroached in succession toward the baseboard that it took several attempts for him to kill the harvester.
But by that time, two more had climbed up inside the back of my T-shirt and began eating me. I got up, pulling at my shirt, trying to swipe my arm behind myself and get the things off me. I could feel their jaws, slicing, biting, like tiny carving knives that cut into the skin on my back. I could hear them chewing.
“Henry!” I lifted my shirt and spun around, urgently assuming Henry would help. He hit me. I didn’t care. I wanted those fucking things off my back.
As soon as Henry swatted the second harvester from me—and it was sickening that I could feel how it dug into my skin and didn’t want to let go—a sea of bugs came spilling out from under the bed, washing toward our feet, like an oozing black flood of tar, like the entire apartment was sinking into a roiling ocean of the monsters, and someone had just pulled a drain plug from the floor.
Henry froze. I shoved him back into the living room and slammed the bedroom door shut. But the harvesters had already reached the doorway, and flattening themselves, the first ones began wriggling through the crack above the floor, frantically scratching with their clicking legs, jaws snapping, flexing, open, shut.
I crushed the first ones with the edge of my shoe as soon as they began to squeeze through. It sounded like I was stomping on lightbulbs, and a burbling mass of rust-colored snot erupted all over the floor, up the leg of my jeans, past my ankle, inside my shoes. Behind me, I heard things tipping over, breaking. Henry was pulling up a thick rug and upending the furniture.
Panting, his cigarette still pinched between his lips, Henry jammed the rug down into the crack beneath the door, and wedged it tightly with his fingers until the opening was sealed. But there were so many harvesters on the other side of the door that I could hear the rasping clatter of their shells and legs, the pincers of their jaws against the door in such great numbers that it sounded like we were deluged in a downpour of pea gravel.
My hands shook. I combed fingers through my hair, tried pulling my shirt away from the spots where my blood cemented it to my back.
And my hand kept bleeding.
“You still think this is home?”
Henry looked sick, gray.
He took another drag on his cigarette, then let the butt fall onto the rug. He stamped it out with his bare foot. Henry swallowed. I could tell he struggled with articulating words. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”
The harvesters began pulling the rug through the crack beneath door.
They were going to get out.
Like everything, it was a matter only of time.
twenty-seven
Henry said, “Do something.”
I didn’t know what I could do.
All I knew was that from the moment I first opened my eyes, lying on my back in the doorway to Henry’s toilet, I hunted for signs that this was not the place.
It would never be the place.
I was lost forever; we all were, skipping through layer after broken layer, hell after rearranged hell, not-worlds upon not-worlds, jumping men, every one of us.
It was the Marbury lens.
I was inside the broken lens, and it was inside me. I would never go home again. And maybe it was just one of those stupid and optimistic things that teenagers tell themselves—no matter how fucked up their lives are—but I could still imagine putting things right, waking up inside Ben and Griffin’s sweaty garage, maybe in my own bed the morning of Conner’s end-of-school party, or perhaps I’d be on top of a bare mattress again, inside an empty room at Freddie Horvath’s house, my foot bound, aching, and I’d be scared, watching the light along the crack at the bottom of a doorway, telling myself This is real, this is real and living through the succession of days nervously watching everything so closely, observing it all with a microscope’s unfailing attention to tiny details, each moment holding my breath, wondering when I’d detect the telltale clue that signified another broken string, as familiar as the sound of a doorbell that welcomes Jack home to another not-here.
But I had the lens.
It was inside my pocket.
The lens would set us free.
When I slipped my hand down inside the pocket of Ander’s jeans, I watched the rug, pulling, jerking, as though it had come to life and was trying to crawl away from me and Henry. I could hear it ripping into shreds beneath the door, getting smaller, a cheap magic trick.
Look, no hands.
I felt it.
Something was wrong.
Something is always wrong.
I grabbed, pulled my hand up.
I was bleeding. Bad now.
Henry said, “You’re bleeding.”
No shit, Henry.
Drip.
Drip.
“What are you going to do?”
Like I could actually decide the outcome.
I opened my hand.
And I was holding on to a black knot, a tangled mass.
A thick nylon zip tie, the kind Freddie Horvath used to bind me down to a bed.
No lens.
It was a fucking zip tie in my pocket.
The rug twitched. It was nearly gone now.
This was it.
Jack was home for good.
“Fuck!” I dropped the black knot like it was burning a hole through my hand. I punched the door. The rug was nearly all the way inside the bedroom, disappearing beneath the crack at the bottom of the door.
“What’s wrong?”
Henry was scared.
Something was wrong.
The lens had to be here.
I dug through my pockets again, frantic. All I had was my cell phone, a pair of yellow tickets for the Tube, and a ten-pound note.
“We need to get the fuck out of here.”
The harvesters were coming for us.
I spun around. This was Marbury. Always something trying to kill you here.
In the tight corner of the main room, in Henry’s kitchen, I began pulling out drawers, dumping them.
Henry caught on quick. He knew the game, too. After all, he’d been stuck in Marbury for most of my life. I grabbed a butcher knife. Henry picked up a stubby knife with a thick blade; it would be hard to break. But I didn’t have time to shop for survival gear.
At least I had shoes.
Henry was barefoot.
Oh well, there would be corpses. There were always corpses, and shoes had half-lifes like goddamned uranium in Marbury.
The rug finally disappeared into the slit beneath the bedroom door. I found an ice pick on the kitchen floor, jammed it down into my back pocket, and we ran out to the hallway, slamming the front door to Henry’s apartment shut behind us.
I don’t know why, but as soon as we were out of Henry’s flat, I thought, This is Marbury with electricity.
Lightbulbs burned in yellowed tulip sconces all the way down the hall, Henry’s phone was ringing when I woke up, and the beers we drank had been cold.
Electricity.
And harvesters that eat people alive.
And no way out.
We ran toward the stairs. Henry’s flat was three floors above the street, and although neither of us had any idea where we might be going, we both knew we had to move, to get out of there.
Henry followed, one step behind me as we made our way down to the first landing. And he nearly knocked me over when I stopped suddenly at the bottom step.
Standing directly in front of us, in the center of the worn carpet where the banister wrapped around and descended to the next floor, was Seth Mansfield.
And Seth was different now, too.
Again.
When I saw him in the desert, where the old man sat propped against his dead horse, I saw an older Seth, with rope burns that wrapped in red slashes around his neck. Now, here he w
as, this unmarked boy who just stood there watching me. He looked angry, too.
It was almost as if I could hear Seth telling me, You fucked up, Jack. You need to put it back together before everything falls apart.
His mouth was pressed tight, a straight line across his face. He was more clear to me now than I had ever seen him; almost solid, real.
This was real.
Seeing the ghost startled Henry. I felt him grab my shoulder, tightly, and I got the impression that he was using me as some sort of barrier between him and Seth.
Seth Mansfield wore shoes and a collared shirt, tucked in neatly beneath a pair of deep blue suspenders. His hair was combed. He looked like he could have been dressed for church, as clean as he was.
I thought about the harvesters in Henry’s apartment, wondered if they were making their way through his front door, and what could possibly be waiting for us down on the street outside.
I asked Seth, “What do we do?”
Seth didn’t answer me. He stood perfectly still, a color-washed portrait of the kid he used to be.
After a moment, I pleaded, “I don’t have any way out of here, Seth. Can you help us get out?”
Seth spun around, his hand spread open, waving, as though clearing smoke from the air in front of him, and when he touched the plaster wall, the entire building started to shake and creak. It was almost like a bomb had gone off. Bits of dust, splinters from a ceiling somewhere above our heads, fell like noisy snow around my feet.
The wall crumbled. I watched as a hole tore open where Seth’s hand passed inside the plaster. The masonry lay exposed, and when Seth pushed his body closer into the wall, I saw—counted—three, four, five bricks tumbling outward, away from him. They spun and scattered down onto the street below.
Everything was falling apart.
The stairwell rolled and shook.
Henry seemed to drain empty behind me. I felt him weaken, wavering as though he might fall down where he stood. He sat on the staircase.
Seth disappeared through the wall, out into the street and the gray fog of the London morning.
Not-London.
I looked back at Henry. “Get up. We need to get out of here.”
Henry stood, weakly, his jaw slack as he stared at the opening Seth had left in the wall.
He’d been in Marbury for ten years. It wasn’t like Henry had never seen a ghost before.